UW Professor Receives Research Award

A University of Wyoming Professor has been selected to receive a prestigious academic award.

Robert Kelly, a UW anthropology professor, was chosen to receive the Alexander von Humbolt Research Foundation Award, according to the University of Wyoming. The Humbolt award recognizes the work of academics whose work has contributed significantly to their particular discipline.

Kelly was nominated for the 60,000 Euro ($71,781) award by German colleagues and recognizes him for a lifetime of research and accomplishment.

Kelly plans to begin work on a new research topic at the University of Tubingen in Germany in the spring of 2018.

Kelly moved from Kentucky to Wyoming in 1997 and took a position at UW as an anthropology professor. He was the department head from 2005 to 2008 and helped created the department’s doctoral program.

He has written over 100 articles, books and reviews including the book “The Fifth Beginning: What Six Million Years of History Can Tell Us About Our Future,” which was published in 2016. He has served on the National Science Foundation and Wenner-Gren proposal review panels and was the president of the Society for American Archaeology and is currently the editor of the society’s journal, American Antiquity.